Page 10 of Greed: The Savage (Seven Deadly Sins #7)

“…I ’ve been teaching the girls to read…”

Thornwick scrubbed a hand along the day’s growth of stubble on his cheeks.

Of anything and everything Addien might have said to account for her sitting around the kitchen tables with The Book of Manners , that hadn’t been it.

“I didn’t know,” Thornwick found an ability to grudgingly concede.

He was starting to realize for all the notes kept, he knew next to nothing about Addien Killoran.

“Now, you do,” she shot back, deserving of her indignation. “Are you so self-centered, so self-absorbed, you think I spend my nights gathering a group of staff here at the club where we then make light of you, Malric ? Is that what you truly believe I do?”

Addien packed such sadness into that question it took a minute for Thornwick to recognize the sentiment for what it was.

Pity.

He recoiled.

My God, she pitied him.

That stabilized him.

A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I heard the other women, Addien,” he curtly reminded her. She couldn’t dispute that.

Fire flashed in her eyes. “I’m not other women.”

“I’m fast discovering,” he muttered under his breath.

An utter wildling, Addien marched back, her white linen nightskirts snapping as if in angry support of their mistress.

She placed her palms on the table and leaned close.

Her body arced towards Thornwick, causing Addien’s demure neckline to gape.

It offered a glimpse of gentle, delicate swells, meant for his palms; dusky peaks, pebbled from the cold, stretched towards him.

He briefly closed his eyes and prayed for restraint.

When he trusted himself to not gawk at her supple body like some randy schoolboy, he opened them again, cursing that she should be so blasted beautiful while readying for battle.

The fight he expected didn’t come.

Addien’s eyes, the color of storm-lit heather, met his own.

“You are correct,” he murmured.

By the delicate lift to her arched eyebrows, she’d not expected that.

Thornwick’s pride hadn’t let him see anything other than Addien, the title he’d assigned her to read, and a group of her friends, and automatically he’d been the object of their discussion.

He’d devoted his life’s work to being a man who left a mark, other than the blood-stained, debauched evil his father would take to the grave.

He might have built himself to be different than the ruthless Duke of Calderay, but there were other ways he was fast discovering to be a wretch.

“I was a complete and total prick, making myself the center of something that had nothing to do with me. My apologies,” he said stiffly.

The incredulity on her countenance made apologizing so oddly agreeable he could almost envision making a habit of it with this woman.

“Yes, well, a man who believes himself quite wise once told me that apologies are empty and to show with my actions.”

Thornwick winced. “Me?”

Addien snorted. “As if you don’t remember.”

“Yes, but it’s easier to pretend it may have not been me?” He gave his best attempt at a sheepish smile.

Addien eyed him warily, reinforcing the actuality that Thornwick had never been one of those charming, roguish sorts—not even in his university days.

Sobering, he lifted his head in acknowledgment of a wrong. “You are right in your suspicion, and you would be right to leave.” But he wanted her to stay.

It’s why he’d given her leave to go. She’d remain out of contrariness.

As he’d wagered, Addien sat.

He quickly took the seat across from her. “How long have you been instructing the staff?”

“Are you going to report me to Dynevor?”

Annoyance brought his lips into a sharp line. “Do you believe—?”

Thornwick caught the mischievous sparkle in her eyes. Had they ever sparkled so? They certainly hadn’t for him.

She let Thornwick off by answering, “Dynevor rescued me some years back, brought me here, and—”

He latched onto that. “Rescued?”

“Aye,” she said, gruff and reluctant. Addien glanced at the surface of the wood table.

Absently, she traced a line left in the wood by some careless diner’s fork, following its path to a slight dent it faded into.

“Got it into my head to sneak an apple and got a constable’s caning for it.

Dynevor put a stop to it and brought me here. ”

His jaw locked hard enough it strained the muscles, but he felt nothing outside of the fury of a predator hungry for prey.

No wonder she idolized Dynevor.

That sat sour in his stomach.

“And…where were you before Dynevor’s gallant rescue?”

The slight frown on the corners of her lips indicated this time she’d picked up on his peevishness.

Her expression went dark. “Foundling hospital,” she said, her voice hollow.

She was holding something back. Thornwick had been armed with ways of extracting secrets from the reluctant and could have easily steered the answers he sought from her lips.

But for some reason, he didn’t want her secrets that way.

Catching his stare, Addien curled her lip. “Are we going to keep pretending that it wasn’t part of your job to research the backgrounds of every member of the staff and that you know exactly what I was—?” Her voice fell to a ragged whisper. “Who I worked for?”

Nightmares ravaged her eyes and managed to wreak that same danger on his chest.

“I know you were in Diggory’s employ.” If possible, even more color leeched from her face when Thornwick spoke the dead gang leader’s name, leaving Addien a sickly shade of white.

Addien swiped The Book of Manners from the table, no doubt to give her fingers something to do.

Sure enough, she fanned those pages that were faded yellow. That fluttering left a small cool breeze that ended when she’d reached the end. Addien started the process over.

“Employ?” she said bitterly. “Is that what you’d call it?”

“What would you ?”

The eyes she raised to his were haunted. “Hell,” she whispered.

She set the book that’d brought them to this point tonight onto the table and studied it like the cover alone could save her from the hauntings in her head.

He knew everything there was to know about Diggory. Part of Thornwick’s work at the Home Office had been to hunt the ruthless gang leader and locate the lost heirs and noble daughters whom he’d abducted for his twisted noble children army.

But he didn’t know what had Addien endured, and he’d not ask her to relive past traumas because he had an insatiable curiosity about the minx.

Thornwick lay a hand over hers. “You got out, Addien,” he said quietly.

His reminder bolstered her. Addien’s slender shoulders straightened, her back proud once more. When she lifted her gaze, her eyes, twin pools of violet fire, caught and held his. “Aye.”

In the years he’d known her, everything he’d learned about her had come in the course of a single day.

And all of her intrigued him more than was safe.

He snatched his hand back from hers. “You should steal some sleep, Addien,” he said. “We both should.”

Addien didn’t fight him.

Climbing to her feet, she nodded. Addien lingered a moment, and he tensed, waiting for her to speak.

“Good night, Malric,” she murmured.

He inclined his head.

Thornwick watched her all the way until she’d gone.

And then he spent the rest of the early morn hours trying to sort out why he’d wanted her to stay.